Posted on 4-3-2004
Disposable cameras
We can't trust photographs. In fact, we never could. In an
exclusive interview, David Hockney tells Jonathan Jones why
painting creates a more reliable record of the truth
"Do you know what Edvard Munch said about photography?"
David Hockney asks me. "He said photography can never depict
heaven or hell." We're talking about Hell at the Fine Art
and Antiques Fair in London's Olympia. Hockney recently drove
to Spain from his current home in west London - "Those
autoroutes are empty. It's fabulous, like driving in Arizona"
- and saw Goya's Third of May in the Prado. He noticed that
Goya had painted this horrific scene of a mass execution in
Madrid in 1808 from a viewpoint no photograph could have achieved.
It adds fuel to his belief that painting can do things photography
can't, even when it comes to telling the truth about war. Everyone
used to assume photographs of war were "true" in a
way photography can't be. But Hockney argues that the digital
age has made such a conception of photography obsolete. You
can change any image now in any way you want. He once saw what
a famous LA photographer's portrait of Elton John looked like
before it was retouched. The difference, he says, was "hilarious".
And now everyone can do this.
"My sister, who is just a bit older than me, she's a retired
district nurse, she's just gone mad with the digital camera
and computer - move anything about; she doesn't worry about
whether it's authentic or stuff like that - she's just making
pictures."
If photography is no longer blunt fact, why not accept that
painting has equal status? War photography is as fictional as
painting, but painting can express profound insights denied
photography. The famous photograph of a Russian soldier placing
the red flag over Berlin is an example: "With the man putting
the flag on top of the Reichstag - how did the photographer
happen to get there first?" wonders Hockney. By contrast,
Goya's image of the executions of May 3 1808 has a truth that
transcends whether or not he was an eyewitness. Hockney thinks
Picasso, when he painted his extremely anti-naturalist Massacres
in Korea in the 1950s, was making this very argument against
photography: instead of random glimpses of violence, Picasso's
painting presents his understanding of the war.
It's funny, talking about war and politics with David Hockney.
Gloom and doom was why he left first Bradford, then Britain.
"I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s. You didn't
know at the time, of course - you didn't know any different."
Hockney talks about his father, in the Bradford accent that
has never deserted him after decades of living in Los Angeles
and now London. "He was a very eccentric man. He was constantly
writing to Stalin - every week. He used to tell us how important
these letters were. We didn't think so. We didn't think Stalin
would be waiting for them." What were the letters about?
"Peace, war. I've given up on all that, I think. I think
the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really. Goya
saw that. A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything,
and you and me."
We're talking about Goya's visions of hell, but I'm thinking
about a vision of heaven: David Hockney's A Bigger Splash, painted
in 1967. In it, the sky is different from the water only in
that it is a paler shade of blue. Between the luxuriant nothingness
of the pool and the empty, warm sky is a low pink house with
a reflecting glass wall, a canvas chair and two palm trees.
In the foreground is a yellow diving board, and beyond it, the
only motion in this eternally afternoon world, are explosions
and curlicues, the aftertrace of a diver.
Hell is not Hockney's subject. Paradise is what his eye has
pursued. "I always wanted to be an artist because I like
looking - scopophilia, is it called?" he says.
In the 1960s, Hockney did as much as the Beatles to end the
British culture of austerity he grew up with, to assert that
pleasure matters. The postwar painters were severe chroniclers
of ration-book misery. We're here at Olympia to celebrate one
of them: Prunella Clough, whose first retrospective since her
death in 1999 includes her 1950s realist portraits of workers
as well as her later, more playful and sometimes gently lovely
abstractions. "It's very good that you're doing this,"
Hockney tells the exhibition's curator, Angus Stewart, who says
Clough was suspicious of people who lived too comfortably. Hockney
says that's typical of a lot of British people. "But I'm
not like that."
He also remembers, among the leading painters when he came
to London, the Scottish duo Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde,
who "always wore these shiny suits - never wore anything
else. They were shiny from never having been off - that kind
of shiny." David Hockney wore a shiny jacket to graduate
from the Royal College of Art - but this was the other kind
of shiny: superstar shiny. It was made out of gold lamé.
Hockney is so famous, so popular, such a great talker and character
that it's easy to take him for granted as an artist. If you're
a critic, it's tempting to give him a bash. But Hockney is a
significant modern painter. He is one of only a handful of 20th-century
British artists who added anything to the image bank of the
world's imagination. Francis Bacon's screaming popes, Richard
Hamilton's Mick Jagger and Damien Hirst's shark are icons of
irony, and grimly Hogarthian. Hockney is something very different,
a modern Gainsborough, whose eye is entranced by beauty. This
is a very radical thing to be.
He was by far the most hedonist of the 1960s pop artists, the
only painter who put sex and utopianism at the heart of his
decade. He was British art's first pop star. But this was not
because he made easy images. His paintings unequivocally praised
gay sex - for example, Two Men in a Shower (1963). They were
so innocent they disarmed everyone.
Hockney's utopia was America. "I went to New York in the
summer of 1961. I thought this is the place, this is it. It
ran 24 hours a day for everybody. Here in London everything
closed early. I used to complain about that like mad. I don't
care now - I go to bed at 11." In his 1961-3 series of
prints A Rake's Progress, "The 7-Stone Weakling in America"
for the first time visits gay bars until "The Wallet Begins
to Empty".
American freedom entranced him a lot more than Swinging London.
"Girls in small skirts, it's OK. You know I'm not that
bothered about them. I preferred the white socks in California,
actually. I did."
Hockney now berates photography and yet, famously, a lot of
his art has been made with photography. Like his friend Andy
Warhol, he was interested in the world you see through the lens.
His series of images of the pursuit and loss of heaven on earth
- the swimming pools, Beverly Hills Housewife (1966), Mr and
Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1) - are paintings that superficially
resemble photographs.
When I look at A Bigger Splash again, I am surprised how much
the quotation he dropped on me from the symbolist painter Edvard
Munch applies to his own work. Hockney doesn't paint hell, but
the heaven on earth, at once blissful and unattainable, that
he found in California and mourned in the aftermath of the 1960s
is a vision photography could never quite create. A Bigger Splash
is a painting about an inner state, an emotional state, somewhere
between intoxication and death - it is the perfect invocation
of a beauty so powerful it hits you like a wall, so empty it
has no solid lines. Blue, pink, white.
Hockney says beauty is the thing none of us can resist. He
saw a picture of a Colorado University football player accused
of rape and the man's face was so incredibly beautiful, he found
it impossible to believe he was guilty. "Human beings always
recognise a very beautiful creature, and open the door for them."
The libertarianism of the 1960s is still there in Hockney,
and still challenging. When the Guardian commissioned and printed
Gillian Wearing's Cilla Black on the cover of G2 last year,
which carried the words "Fuck Cilla Black", he "thought
it was quite funny. I had no idea Cilla Black was alive or anything."
He was amazed that so many letters attacked it. The paper's
art critic defended this as a work of art. Fine. Then Hockney
read an interview in the Guardian with a man who spent two years
in prison for downloading images from the internet. The man
claimed he did not think the pictures were wrong, but innocent
and beautiful. "This man who, from human curiosity, looking
for innocence and beauty, gets some pictures from the internet
and does two years in prison for that. Why don't you art critics
talk about that?"
This is why he wants to get people thinking about photography
- the way we see, and the power of images. "It's time to
debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for
downloading them."
Photography, with its claim to truth, is a discipline, he thinks,
and he's glad digital technology is ending the rule of the one-eyed
monster that never lied. "I suppose I never thought the
world looked like photographs, really. A lot of people think
it does but it's just one little way of seeing it. All religions
are about social control. The church, when it had social control,
commissioned paintings, which were made using lenses" -
as Hockney has argued in his book Secret Knowledge - "and
when it stopped commissioning images, its power declined, slowly.
Social control today is in the media - and based on photography.
The continuum is the mirrors and lenses."
Hockney is an artist who, at his best, broke free of all disciplines,
of photography or politics or anything else, to paint his own
paradise. He's still looking for enjoyment. He left America
because it has become so prissy about smoking and drinking -
but he'll go back, he says. He smokes with evident pleasure.
"I was born in Bradford in 1937, it was the smokiest place
on earth. We all survived - some people might have coughed a
bit and fallen over."
Having been so long in America, there's a lot of Europe he
hasn't seen. He's just been to Andalusia for the first time.
The Spanish, he says - they know how to enjoy themselves.
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